Significant numbers in the Black community feel betrayed by our so-called allies who ignored the warnings by Black people regarding the elections, their political rhetoric, and the history of racism and white supremacy in the country. So, in response to feelings of betrayal, a Black preacher in Chicago recently framed the sentiment on social media, writing, “Nope, I turned out in November; they didn’t!”
This feeling seems pervasive within the Black community as people articulate the frustrations felt because of the outcome of the presidential elections last November. When asking people to turn out for the “Hands Off” rallies, the Gaza and pro-Palestinian demonstrations, or even to protest the roundup of immigrants, there is a post-November 2024 pushback which is derived from a sense of betrayal because the people now asking for our participation and support did not stand with the Black community during the 2024 elections. In barbershops, beauty shops, nail salons, social clubs, fraternities, and sororities, discussions have been animated, expressing various theories in America’s rejection of a Black person for President, and particularly in this case, a Black woman. The underlying feelings are those of betrayal and desertion.
Sure, there are all kinds of justifications for the rejection of the Harris/Walz ticket, ranging from the Biden/Harris support of the genocide in Gaza, claims that “she [Harris] was a prosecutor who contributed to mass incarceration,” to “I will not vote for the lesser of two evils.”
There were also economic arguments citing inflation and the failure of the Biden administration to deal with the cost of going to the grocery store. There were also the clandestine discussions laced with misogyny and racism, suggesting that a woman was unable to lead, and a Black woman was even worse than a Black man. Race and gender hatred are strong undercurrents of the Harris rejection, which is confirmed by the Trump/MAGA obsession with attacking and dismantling all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
The dog-whistle to white America is that DEI led to the election of a Black president in 2008, the increasing visibility of other Black faces, the prominence of people of color, and different kinds of people in government and leadership, as well as advancing the sensibilities of gender equality. The anti-DEI framework also believes that immigrants have been welcomed and coddled by offering sanctuary and protection, multiplying their numbers, which dilutes the white population and poses a serious threat to the powers of white supremacy and the white ability to rule. Indeed, we are seeing and witnessing currently an aggressive clutch for power and the reassertion of white supremacy.
The Black community had seen all this before and can still hear the ghostly chains of enslavement synchronized to the racist tropes of old. The Black community was largely not fooled by the appeals of grocery store affordability or removing immigrants to make way for “black” jobs, or the other empty promises of MAGA/Trump. We had seen it all, and it is incredulous for us to believe that others could not see what we saw.
Likewise, it is difficult and unbelievable to hear people now state that “it is worse than I imagined.” We knew what would happen, and we feel betrayed by so-called allies who did not listen to our counsel, should have understood the racist history of America better, and heeded the violence planned against people because of race, immigration, gender, or belonging to the LGBTQIA community. Instead of heeding all our warnings and alarms, significant numbers of white women, Latinos, and even some Black folks chose to drink the Kool-Aid of a sanitized racism sweetened with appeals of bringing jobs home, cheaper eggs, and making America first in the world.
There are all kinds of justifications for Trump’s victory in 2024. Economic grievances, the lesser of two evils argument, objections resulting from the Gaza genocide, concern over Harris’s legal career and governmental service, and the secret handshakes and winks expressing real disdain for a Black woman led to Harris’s defeat. But the latter three arguments or justifications were not persuasive to the Black community because the choices offered in this political system have always been the lesser of two evils, and racial history in America has taught us of the precariousness of life and that we always live under the threat of a massacre or genocide.
We have never experienced a benevolent government. Though some governments and candidates have been better than others, the very structure of governance has never been benevolent. The system is not a system that is just or fair, but it has always been a system where fights have had to be waged for justice and fairness. We have always had to weigh who would be better on race, and who would be worse. We have had to weigh who would be better to fight against versus who would be worse. We have had to analyze and understand what sources of money and forces of political power were behind a candidate and what that ultimately meant for the safety of the Black community and our advancement. The lesser of the worst arguments has always been the Black reality, and we have understood historically that the system is malicious in character, racially unjust, and unfair. There has been a constant fight to go forward, and a continuous struggle against being pushed back.
We said to the immigrant community that the assault on race was real, that the immigrant community would be hunted and hounded like Black folks were before and after passage of the Slave Fugitive Act, or stopped and arrested like scores of people “driving while Black,” but we were not heard or understood.
Portions of the Latino community were pulled to the right and voted against their own interests despite the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Trump/MAGA agenda. A segment of the Latino community did not realize at the time that the rhetoric would criminalize and endanger all of the Latino community. A resident of Prince George’s County, Maryland—Kílmar Abrego García—was disappeared to El Salvador. According to the administration, his arrest and deportation were a mistake, but it is a mistake that the administration obstinately refuses to correct.
There are also Latinos being stopped and arrested by masked goons and swept away. It is reported that the administration is scouring through social media and legal documents, gleaning any kind of justification for the cancellation of student visas and the deportation of immigrants (documented and undocumented). Yet, 43% of the Latino community voted for Trump! This represented an increase of 8% more Latino votes going to Trump than in the previous presidential elections. When we hear this statistic, we are rightfully alarmed, yet we cannot lose sight of the fact that this also means that 57% of the Latino community understood the struggle in America and took seriously the alarm cited by the Black community.
We were further alarmed by women who seem unable to hear the warnings of misogyny that have been experienced throughout the Black sojourn in America. The struggle to have autonomy over being, health, and existence has been all too real in the Black experience. Therefore, the Black community felt that women would surely hear, understand, and mobilize around the assaults on reproductive freedom, healthcare, and body autonomy. So, it was a surprise to know that 53% of white women voted for Trump. Similar majorities of white women have backed Republican presidential nominees in every election since 2004. But we have also forgotten, because of the ways statistics are sensationalized, that a majority of “ALL” women voted for the Harris/Walz ticket. They rejected the narrow and racist perspectives of the right-wing agenda in this election and in previous elections as well.
We can emotionally understand the Arab/Muslim/Pro-Palestine base not voting for Harris. By any stretch of the imagination, it would have been a steep climb to expect them to simply vote for the supporters of the Netanyahu-led genocide in Gaza. So, this bloc of voters in protest either voted for Trump, a third-party candidate, or sat out the elections as punishment for the Biden/Harris blind support of Israel. But not voting for the lesser of two evils in this case was to cast a vote for the victor, Trump. The protest vote, whether for Trump, a third-party candidate, or to sit out the election, had the effect of turning loose and unmuzzling the monster of America’s original sin—racism and white supremacy. It meant rewarding the deeply entrenched agenda of whiteness and unleashing a ferocious and unapologetic form of hatred that will require extreme and herculean measures to resist.
Yet even the Black community is not immune to its own contradictions rooted in sexism and racial self-hatred. We are infected with all the gender bias that exists in the larger community, as well as our own struggles against one another. For example, though Harris won 80% of the Black vote, that, however, represented a 10% drop from Biden in 2020. This means that 90% of the Black community would vote for a white man versus only 80% for a Black woman. Biden received 81 million votes in 2020 and Harris only 75 million in 2024. Six million votes either stayed home or were cast for a third-party candidate. It was not necessarily that Biden was a better candidate than Harris, but he was white and male!
The Trump/MAGA forces exploited the gender and race biases within the Black, Latino, and white (male and female) communities. The political right offered and framed news stories and opinions promoting the gender crisis for Harris among Black males in an effort to give permission to Black males to desert a Black woman. There is also the psychological damage of being Black in a white world where the culture has conditioned people to think that white is better than Black, and a white male being seen as far better than a Black female!
The impurity and contradictions of the American political system have always placed before us choices of evil. The Black perspective, however, had always had to discern which evil is more entrenched and enshrined in the callous and sub-human hatred of old. One evil represents a historical cloth that produced the Trail of Tears, protected slavery, removed Indigenous people from lands at home and abroad, and celebrates white supremacy and power, and theologically calls it Manifest Destiny.
We have had to constantly organize against and challenge this evil endeavor to bend it towards justice or break it. One evil is clothed in the hatred and imperialism of old, and the other, though bad, was the lesser of evils that represented a dynamic that the Black community always had to live with and struggle with. Again, people did not and could not hear our counsel to stand and fight another day than to lose and have it all taken away by madmen unapologetically bent on a white agenda in a white world.
We recognized who and what the Trump/MAGA movement is and what it meant to the safety of the Black community. We also knew intuitively that the safety of the Black community also meant the safety of all our allies, whether those allies were real or not. Black people could see the writing on the walls because we have heard all the rhetoric before lingering in the air and echoing through the cobwebbed hallways of racial struggle that unfortunately is not only of the past but in the present.
We are startled to think that people are still deluded by myths of democracy and think the system is well-meaning. People believe in the kindness of the system only because the legacies of enslavement, exploitation, and genocide are ignored, along with the continuing effects of those legacies. The banning of books, the discarding of photographs showing images of Black people and women, the erasing of history, and the castigation of Critical Race Theory are calculated programs to further sanitize the foul odors of the country’s past and present.
Given all those factors, it should be no surprise that Trump was able to declare victory because of a combination of arguments and reasons that were woven from the torn mythologized fabric of America’s illusion of democracy and its altruism. We were surprised and shocked by what appeared to be a betrayal by people and movements that we considered to be part of the wall guarding against the re-entrenchment of racism, misogyny, hatred, xenophobia, and white supremacy. We were surprised, in shock, bewildered, and astonished by people who did not recognize the historical language of racism or the vicious actions that would ensue from it. The feelings of betrayal are real, but are also shallow and misguided.
The sense of betrayal and alienation plays into the hands of the forces dismantling DEI, deporting immigrants, curbing First Amendment rights, and flagrantly violating the rule of law. They were able to get elected because they fostered spears of division that separated us over gender, race, and economics. Their strategy worked superbly. Our unity is our strength. If we don’t join together in this current crisis and the battles to come, but sit on the sidelines licking our wounds, continuing to feel offended and betrayed, then the forces of oppression win.
Let’s admit that we have all been played, and their agenda was to play us against one another, fracturing votes over one issue or another and splintering one constituency group from the other until the numbers secured their victory. We have been played, and it is important for us to remember that the political game of fascism will have its way with us if we decide to sit out the various movements that attempt to resist this currently hostile order. This means that we must support one another from federal workers to Palestine, from Black Lives and reparations to LGBTQIA rights, from immigrants to the rights of foreign students to study and speak out. All the issues are mine. And all the issues must be ours. We must support one another and join together so that no one is left out or behind. As Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Emma Lazarus said similarly, “No one is free until everyone is free.”
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, this article reflects the views of its author.
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